With its task integration and care coordination capabilities, Microsoft Teams in healthcare makes life much easier for doctors.
The cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that is Microsoft Teams has great and transformative potential in healthcare to make life much easier for doctors. Today, Teams assets such as its voice or video meeting capabilities, its power to enable real-time chat messaging between groups, and its tools that allow healthcare workers to share documents securely drive timely and effective collaboration, communications and health outcomes at every stage of the patient journey.
The manifold benefits of using Microsoft Teams in healthcare touch on an eclectic array of industry activities. These include:
- Facilitating and streamlining data collection.
- Scheduling, managing and conducting virtual visits to enhance telemedicine consultations.
- Providing live broadcasts of complex surgeries and holding online conferences and training sessions.
- Coordinating worker shifts across days, weeks or even months with the help of an integrated Microsoft Shifts app.
- Centralizing document storage to more efficiently access and manage patient records and other critical information.
- Enabling data security and compliance with HIPAA and other vital protocols.
What sets Microsoft Teams apart from other similar offerings is that it can integrate all of the various communication modes and data resources cohesively under a single security-compliant, data retention model.
Coordination Across Multiple Fronts
Teams is at its best when its integration of workforce activities enrolls everyone into the same easy access to important information.
Consider a hospital, where workers can use Teams capabilities to coordinate care. Everyone in the office joins in a general chat, and the different groups of workers (doctors, nurses, receptionists, and so on) can ask questions and communicate within their own dedicated channels. Staff in different departments can keep up to date without having to leave their stations by using Teams meetings and calls. Multiple staff caring for a single patient can share notes and care plans over Teams. And medical instrument technicians and others who likewise work with instruments and machinery can share facts and care documents about their equipment.
The highest value of Microsoft Teams is in the multiple ways it has made healthcare providers’ lives easier by simplifying and optimizing patient care workflows in multiple healthcare settings. Its power is such that it lets you expedite and consolidate collaboration among care teams and throughout your entire organization in a single app. Here’s how.
Work closely in concert.
Frontline workers can use walkie-talkies to communicate hands-free and instantly. A customizable home screen creates a unified platform where staffers can find out everything that’s going on within their healthcare organization. Announcements broadcast to specific areas of the organization can keep work teams aligned for centrally planned and coordinated action.
Becoming more efficient.
Automation makes it easy to digitize task management, so there are fewer manual administrative processes to execute. A centralized dashboard gives leaders a ready view of shows what their care teams are doing. Users can quickly collect frontline data and perceptively analyze it to yield actionable insights.
Ensure data and device protection.
IT teams can be empowered to manage all endpoints for personal and company devices. By making password use much less complicated and involving through an easy, quick sign-in, organizations can centralize access across care teams. Intelligent data classification and security risk detection provide stronger protection for sensitive data. Features such as secure messaging and data encryption keep sensitive information confidential and accessible only to authorized personnel.
Integrate with existing systems.
Integrating Microsoft Teams in healthcare with electronic health records (EHR) systems delivers a seamless flow of patient data, while the development of custom apps within Teams satisfies specific needs such as appointment reminders and patient monitoring.
Microsoft also updates the Teams platform with features that expand its care coordination functionality. Within the past year, it has increased the threshold for the number of individual patient treatment channels on which care teams can collaborate from 200 to 1,000 to meet the needs of larger organizations whose patient caseload is well over 200.
In at least one instance, a healthcare provider whose patient caseload could fluctuate below and above 200 would delete or archive all its team interaction data on short-term patients to make space on those channels for new patients. That’s no longer necessary.
Arguably, deploying a software system such as Microsoft Teams that lessens the effort, complexity, and – frankly – the drudgery of work functions can reduce the incidence of physician burnout. Indeed, in its latest survey on this subject, the American Medical Association found that physician burnout has fallen from a record high of 62.8 percent in 2021 to below 50 percent for the first time in four years.
So, then, what can using Microsoft Teams in healthcare do on a daily basis for any given physician?
A Real-World Look at Teams for Collaborative Healthcare
A hypothetical day-in-the-life of a working physician illustrates how using Microsoft Teams in healthcare could make that day much less burdensome.
Soon after waking up, that doctor can get a Teams chatbot to furnish her with a prioritized list of her day’s key activities from a Teams data repository – important meetings, messages needing attention, new information about her patients, and potential schedule conflicts. A couple of hours later, she and her team can hold a digital huddle through a Teams dashboard that records data from the meeting in a secure database and, consequently, improves care coordination and communication among the far-flung team members.
Where Teams really proves itself is in how it helps the doctor deal with an unpleasant, unexpected turn in a patient’s condition. After the Teams secure messaging system notifies her around mid-morning about complications that developed after a procedure from the day before, the doctor uses Teams to alert everyone on the patient’s care team to quickly meet and develop a response plan.
Once she stabilizes the patient, the doctor conferences with the patient’s family on Teams to update them firsthand on her condition and tell them how they can help, while Teams alerts the hospital pharmacy about the patient’s new medication regimen.
Once the storm of activity dies down, the doctor takes a breather to quickly update the patient’s chart – which she can do on any device through Teams without having to log into a VPN or remember a password. A mid-day consult with her team a few hours later has her using Teams to pull up notes, photos from the procedure, and the latest scans. An invaluable assist to this process is that Teams’ ambient voice documentation records all team members on the call and converts their words into discrete data, such as orders, that can help the doctor and all the other physicians on the team.
Unity in action – effective action – is what Microsoft Teams for healthcare is all about.
Teams Truly Is About Teamwork
The case for deploying Microsoft Teams in healthcare is what its name embodies: teamwork. Teams brings patient care team members together with a unified, accurate, and up-to-date field of information through multiple communication formats so that they can work as one on the highest level, benefiting their patients.
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